Ride Island to present a public program on Cambridge street design for biking, walking, and transit

Source: RIDE Island

Ride Island Presents the first in a Speaker Series addressing safe infrastructure and road design for active transportation.

Ahead of the Curve: Award Winning Cambridge Street Design From the 1990s to Today

April 30 6-7:30pm
Innovate Newport 513 Broadway, Newport RI
All Welcome – Free Registration at Eventbrite.

Today, many streets in the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, demonstrate the best practices for traffic calming, pedestrian safety, separated bicycle lanes, and transit priority – but it wasn’t always this way. How did Cambridge make this progress? What can we learn from Cambridge’s progression, its current road design, its plans, its accomplishments, and its challenges?

The transformation began in the 1970’s – with the cancellation of a massive 8-lane highway that would have gone through the center of the city.  Those federal funds were repurposed into a critical subway expansion program. Later, in 1992, the “Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance” led to the launch of the bicycle and pedestrian program and the first bike lanes. In 1998, the “Parking and Transportation Demand Management” ordinance put a cap on drive to work trips for new developments.

Widespread deployment of traffic calming measures in the early 2000s was followed by a systematic effort to repurpose excess roadway space for wider sidewalks and bike lanes, including the first separated bike lane since Davis, CA in 1967. In 2015, one of Cambridge’s next-generation protected bike lanes was named the “best new bike lane in the US.”

The 2019 “Cycling Safety Ordinance”, motivated by a spate of deaths, mandated implementation of the Cambridge Bicycle Network Plan on an aggressive timeline. Simultaneously, the City’s newly-formed Transit Team began rolling out bus priority lanes. The travel lane reductions and removal of parking that is required by these two plans has caused political pushback over the past several years.

On April 30th, Jeff Rosenblum, former City of Cambridge employee, will address the nuances of how this all happened, as Ride Island presents the first in its upcoming Speaker Series on safe infrastructure and road design for active transportation.

Jeff Rosenblum is Principal Planner at Toole Design. Jeff co-founded the Boston-based non-profit Livable Streets Alliance, worked as a planner and engineer for the City of Cambridge, and co-teaches a Sustainable Transportation summer course in the Netherlands for Northeastern University students.

Ride Island is a collaborative initiative to advance and support active transportation on Aquidneck Island, led by Bike Newport, Grow Smart RI, and Toole Design; and supported by the van Beuren Charitable Foundation.

All are welcome. 
Free Registration at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ride-island-speaker-series-cambridge-street-design-tickets-879654679827